Different — he was always different. Normalcy for Jonathan Bender withered away with every inch he shot up as a teenager, from a springy 6-3 to a stringbean 6-11, and was gone altogether by the time he graduated from high school.

He was no longer just another talented teenager, he was the next preps-to-pros prodigy, the rarest of prospects: A basketball player blessed with a center's height and a guard's game. He was the kid who broke Michael Jordan's McDonald's All-American Game scoring record; the kid with the 39-inch vertical leap; the kid, they said, who could become the next Magic Johnson.

"Think Kevin Durant before there was a Kevin Durant," says Pacers executive Donnie Walsh, who was so enchanted by Bender's upside he traded Indiana enforcer Antonio Davis for Bender after Toronto made him the fifth pick in the 1999 NBA Draft on behalf of the Pacers.

"I've never drafted a player with more potential," Walsh says 15 years later. "I can tell you that without even thinking about it."

Curious — Bender, too, was always curious. He came from nothing, in tiny Picayune, Miss., grew to nearly seven feet and became a millionaire at 17. Still, he sought more. Amidst a sprint, he dreamt of winning a marathon.

Even as a precocious young star with the Pacers, Bender's road-trip reading consisted of books on business tycoons Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. Occasionally, he'd find himself parked in his Mercedes outside the gated mansion of Pacers co-owner Mel Simon, the ambitious NBA newbie captivated by his billionaire boss's self-made success.

He admired the shopping mall magnate from afar but never summoned the gusto to speak with him. For Bender, this is where different and curious collided. Like Simon, he wanted to create. To build. To provide. Success in sports, it seemed, had come too soon, too easily. Bender was as much a rarity off the court as on it: He was the star athlete who looked long-term.

What happens, he wondered, when basketball stops?

"At a time in the league when everybody was idolizing Michael Jordan, Jonathan was idolizing Mel Simon," Walsh remembers.

4/8/02. Jonathan Bender, camps out on the court during a brief break following a failed offensive possession by the Pacers. Indiana lost 111-99 to put their playoff hopes in jeapordy.
ROBERT SCHEER INI STAR

PACERS09 97290 5/08/04 SAM RICHE / THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR:Indiana's Jonathan Bender drives to the basket in second half action. The Indiana Pacers hosted the Miami Heat Saturday afternoon, May 8, 2004 at Conseco Fieldhouse in game two of the Eastern Conference semifinals. The Pacers won the game 91-80.
Sam Riche Indianapolis Star

Indiana's Jonathan Bender battles for the ball against Miami's Caron Butler in second half action. The Indiana Pacers traveled to Miami, FL to battle the Miami Heat Monday night, May 10, 2004 at American Airlines Arena in game three of the Eastern Conference semifinals. The Pacers lost the game 94-87.
Sam Riche Indianapolis Star

PACERS25 98285 5/24/04 SAM RICHE / THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR:Indiana's Jonathan Bender rips down this rebound against Detroits Corliss Williamson. The Indiana Pacers host the Detroit Pistons in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals at Conseco Fieldhouse on Monday night, May 24, 2004. The Pacers lost the game 72-67.
Sam Riche Indianapolis Star

PACERS11A 97291 5/010/04 SAM RICHE / THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR:Indiana's Jermaine O'Neal and Jonathan Bender try to stop Miami's Lamar Odom in second half. The Indiana Pacers traveled to Miami, FL to battle the Miami Heat Monday night, May 10, 2004 at American Airlines Arena in game three of the Eastern Conference semifinals. The Pacers lost the game 94-87.
Sam Riche Indianapolis Star

11/17/04 --- Indiana Pacers Jonathan Bender,right, drives to the hoop on his former teammate Atlanta's Al Harrington,left, in the first half of their game Wednesday night at Conseco Fieldhouse. (Matt Kryyger Photo) with story, File #105275
Matt Kryger Indianapolis Star

BKN-ENTREPRENEUR -- Former NBA power forward Jonathan Bender stands at one of the apartments that he has renovated in New Orleans on Monday, June 9, 2008. His Jonathan Bender Foundation, a nonprofit corporation, works to empower disadvantaged children by providing them tools to address their educational, health and social needs, while his for-profit construction company buys flood-ravaged housing and restores it to better quality than it was pre-Katrina. (Gannett News Service, Joe Ellis/The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger)
JOE ELLIS GNS

New York Knicks' Jonathan Bender, right, deflects a pass by Chicago Bulls' Kirk Hinrich during the first quarter of an NBA basketball game on Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2009, at Madison Square Garden in New York. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
Julie Jacobson AP

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Then the game was taken from him. Basketball, for Jonathan Bender, first stopped when he was 25.

"It can be a very short shelf life," Bender says now. "As a professional athlete, you're just a product. In my mind, I wanted to create something that could live forever. Something that wouldn't fade out. Something that people would need."

His career as a Pacer ground to a halt in 2006. Chronic knee pain — the result, Bender believes to this day, of that abnormal growth spurt during his teenage years — winnowed his seasons down: From 46 games played in the 2002-03 season to 21 the next year, to seven, to two. By his sixth season, about the time Walsh envisioned him becoming the post-Reggie Miller face of the Pacers, Bender could barely walk down a flight of stairs.

So he retired, leaving all that potential unrealized.

What if?

Fair or unfair, it became the question that will trail Jonathan Bender the rest of his life.

***

Bender is 33 now and he won't play the What if? game. Too painful. Too futile. Plus, these days, he doesn't have the time. He's too busy pushing forward.

Now, the can't-miss prospect who washed out of the NBA at 25 is resurrecting his life as a blossoming businessman. This is Jonathan Bender 2.0: Building the brand of a joint-strengthening device he invented, refined, markets and sells.

So effective it's one that, had it come around a decade prior, it could have saved his basketball career.

Bender knows failure on the court and off. After six seasons in Indiana, he packed up, sold his Carmel home and moved to Houston, where the warmth would offer solace to his brittle knees. The cartilage was so worn down, the doctors told him, he'd never play again.

FILE - Pacers forward Jonathan Bender, camps out on the court during a brief break April 8, 2002.(Photo: Robert Scheer / The Star)

He'd tried. He'd spent months at a time in Boston, working with renowned trainer Dan Dyrek, the same man who helped sustain Larry Bird's career in the late '80s after his back betrayed him. But for Bender, the pain always kept coming back.

"I'd feel good for five minutes, then 10 minutes into practice, it'd feel like people were stabbing my knees over and over," he says. "It became mentally exhausting because I felt like I was failing over and over."

Then it was done; the Pacers waived him in June 2006. Bender was labeled one of the biggest busts in NBA history.

“At a time in the league when everybody was idolizing Michael Jordan, Jonathan was idolizing Mel Simon.”

Donnie Walsh

Life after basketball began with a string of poor investments that severely sliced into the $30 million he'd accrued during his career: Concert promotions, real estate, a record label. Nothing stuck. Bender was, in just his late 20s, on the brink of becoming the latest pro athlete to squander his fortune.

So he changed course. He stopped thinking quick-fix and started thinking long-term. As a kid, he'd create, design and build his own bicycles and parachutes. To succeed, he finally surmised, he'd have to start from scratch.

Slumped on a park bench in Houston one afternoon shortly after leaving Indiana, Bender returned to his roots. As he watched runners and walkers stroll by, a lightbulb went off in his head.

He raced off to Walgreens, then to Home Depot, then to Sports Authority. ("Picture a 6-11 guy walking up and down every aisle for like an hour," he says.) He bought electrical tape, rubber bands, zip ties, ankle braces, metal rods and wire cutters. He went home, slapped together what he'd sketched out in his head, and asked his girlfriend, Bernice, to come into the room.

"Try this on," he told her.

She looked at it and laughed.

***

"It looked like garbage," Bender admits.

But it worked. The initial prototype of what would become the JBIT MedPro — picture a weight belt attached to ankle braces with elastic bands — accomplished exactly what Bender wanted: It relieved stress off the lower joints by making the quadriceps, hamstrings and calf muscles labor more intensely than usual. Simply put: It took the stress off his knees.

Back pad and waist band by Jonathan Bender(Photo: Provided photo)

Bender tested it, refined it, tested it, and refined it. Seeking a second opinion, he took it to the engineering wing at Purdue University. Here was an NBA has-been, a kid from rural Mississippi who never attended college, pitching ideas and brainstorming with biomedical researchers who analyze up to 30 potential inventions a year.

It was pure Bender: Always different, always curious.

"Jonathan tends to break down a lot of stereotypes," says Eric Nauman, the Purdue professor who examined Bender's device. "He comes in, and with his background, I'm sort of like, 'I don't know if this thing is going to fly.' But as soon as you talk to him, you can tell he gets it. He knew exactly what he envisioned, this sort of external hamstring, and was very good at getting his ideas across."

Nauman and a group of graduate assistants all agreed: Bender's contraption did shift pressure away from the knees. All that remained before it could hit the stores: Bender had to demonstrate the results. And he knew there'd be no greater guinea pig than himself.

If he could rehabilitate the very knees that cut short his NBA career, he determined, it would prove his device was "undeniable."

So he spent a year in the gym, working out every day with his invention. In 2009, his knees feeling stronger than ever, he reached out to Walsh, who was by then general manager of the New York Knicks.

"I want to give it another shot," Bender told him.

Walsh gave him a tryout and, so immediately impressed, signed him midway through the 2009-10 season. For a few short months, Bender was reborn, averaging 4.7 points in a little over 11 minutes a game off the bench. Yet the maintenance was a constant struggle: Bender had to do leg squats on the bench to keep his knees loose, and after each game, he'd run through a strength workout with his MedPro in his hotel room.

But, for Bender, it was a redemption of sorts. He'd proven he could play again. He'd proven his invention could yield results. Most telling, perhaps, was what the Knicks training staff told him after running him through a series of workouts: That he had the strongest lower body of anyone on the team.

Walsh offered him a contract for a second season, but by then, Bender knew he was being pulled in a different direction. For the first time in his life, business trumped basketball.

All that was left was finding a market. Bender packed up his prototypes, hit the stores and pitched his product.

"When I played, I could play anywhere on the court," he says. "This was sort of the same thing. I didn't want to just invent it, I wanted to prove I could sell it, too. I wanted to be able to do everything."

An inventor's mind with a salesman's drive, Bender walked into a Relax the Back store in Sugarland, Tex., one afternoon and met the manager, who told him he suffered from the lower-back condition sciatica.

"Try this out," Bender told him, confidently handing him his MedPro.

It didn't take long. The manager, so startled by its effectiveness, bought one on the spot.

Similar stories soon followed. One elderly man who, after a nasty motorcycle accident, hadn't been able to walk up stairs in 20 years. That was until he tried Bender's product.

"The best part of all of this is seeing his passion," says Bernice, now Bender's wife. "He's not wishing he was still playing basketball. More than anything, he loves helping people, like that old man who had some of the same pain he did."

Bender has partnered with Relax the Back and is now selling his MedPro (retail: $199) off his own website. The byproduct of Bender's imaginative mind that day in a Houston park has spawned a company — JB3 Innovations — and a product that has propelled revenue growth of 40 percent month-over-month since December. Even more, his affiliate program offers potential entrepreneurs a platform to build their wealth.

He aims for more. While the current MedPro model has found a home among baby boomers (Bender himself sold 300 units his first two months), he hopes to soon polish off a model designed for serious athletes.

He imagines it thwarting the nagging knee pain that often accompanies a sudden growth spurt. And maybe for the man who invented it, it would further prove Jonathan Bender — always different, always curious — was destined to find success all along.